Inpainting U-Net for seamless pedestrian-level wind prediction across urban morphologies

Jingzi Huang, Claire E. Heaney, Tao Li, Xinzhe Li, Graham O. Hughes, Maarten van Reeuwijk

Pedestrian-level wind prediction is essential for urban design and wind-comfort assessment, but high-fidelity simulations such as LES remain computationally expensive for rapid evaluation. This study develops a two-stage U-Net framework for efficient prediction of time-averaged pedestrian-level wind speed over realistic urban morphologies. The model is trained and evaluated using the UrbanTALES dataset, which contains realistic city configurations under different approaching wind directions. In the first stage, a baseline U-Net model (M1) predicts wind fields patch-by-patch from normalised building height and fetch information. This formulation allows application to urban domains of arbitrary size, but independent patch inference can introduce discontinuities at patch boundaries. To address this, a second U-Net model (M2) is introduced as an inpainting-based refinement model. M2 uses a larger contextual window containing the initial M1 prediction and local morphology to reduce discontinuities using neighbouring flow information. During full-field inference, M2 is applied iteratively using a Gauss-Seidel scheme until convergence. Results show that M1 captures the main spatial distribution of pedestrian-level wind speed and performs well in low- and moderate-velocity regions, although high-velocity peaks are less accurate. M2 substantially reduces patch-boundary artefacts and improves spatial coherence. Across unseen urban cases, the framework reproduces mean velocity and spatial variability reasonably well, while maximum velocities remain underestimated. Overall, the proposed framework provides an efficient and flexible surrogate model for high-resolution pedestrian-level wind prediction across realistic urban morphologies.